Things I Remember About Dad

By Sharon Gibson

Something I remember about my Dad was that he was a very conscientious about his job. He was a chauffeur for Western Electric and had to drive the bosses around. Most of the time he knew exactly where he was going, but if he was unsure he would go on a “dry run” to make sure he didn’t get lost. I remember once we all took a ride to Milwaukee just so he could check out where he was supposed to go.

Also, I do not remember him missing work, except for the blizzard in 1967 when we received 27 inches of snow. Even on that day he tried to get to work but wound up getting the car stuck in the snow. Another time he sustained a second or third degree burn to his hand, the back of his hand was one huge blister and still went to work instead of a doctor. They sent him to the company nurse and she treated it and bandaged it for him.

Another thing I remember about my Dad was when we did something wrong he would make a big show of being angry. He would pretend to be taking his belt off to spank us. He would stand there and move his feet and start to unbuckle it. We would take off running. Funny thing is I don’t remember him ever spanking us.

Another memory had to do with some pigeons we had. These pigeons just flew in one day and never left, as a matter of fact as time went on more showed up and they even had babies. Of course as kids we thought this was great. We named them, fed them and at some point Dad even made a coop for them. As you know pigeons are kind of messy birds and Dad was getting tired of the mess so one day he decided to catch them and bring them into the city and release them under one of the viaducts. So off he went with the birds but by the time he got back they had already found their way home.

Dad

Guest post by James D. Studlo

My father would have been 100 years old on July 22^nd so I thought it would be appropriate to commemorate the occasion in by writing what I knew about him.

I thought it would be best to start with what the world was like that he was born into and how he was fortunate to have been born here in the United States.

• The year saw the birth of some famous people including Gerald Ford, Jesse Owens, Vince Lombardi, Rosa Parks and Jimmy Hoffa.
• Some of the news stories were very similar to ours today. The 16th Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, authorizing the Federal government to impose and collect income taxes. The populace protested vigorously,
• The Woolworth building opens in New York City. Designed by Cass Gilbert, it is the tallest building in the world at this date and for more than a decade after.
• The US was fighting a war overseas: Battle of Bud Bagsak in the Philippines concludes with U.S. troops under General John J. Pershing taking Bug Bagsak from defending Moro rebels, killing at least 500. 39^th street in Chicago is named for General Pershing, most people who ride on it don’t have a clue as to who he was.
• The 50th anniversary commemoration of the Battle of Gettysburg draws thousands of American Civil War veterans and their families to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, needless to say there were no veterans at the 150th just celebrated .
• The Lincoln Highway, the first automobile road across the United States is dedicated; I still drive on parts of it today.
• U.S. President Woodrow Wilson triggers the explosion of the Gamboa Dike, ending construction on the Panama Canal, it has since been turned over to the Panamanians.
• The Ford Motor Company introduces the first moving assembly line, reducing chassis assembly time from 12½ hours in October to 2 hours, 40 minutes; it takes just under six hours today.
• Surprise, the Jews and Palestinians were fighting in the Middle East, Israel was then known as Palestine.

The Polish people had fallen on hard times in Europe in the 1700 and 1800s. There was no Polish state and many of the Poles were scattered around parts of Germany and Russia. Although they were often tradesman and hardworking they found themselves to be the subject of discrimination so many of them sought better conditions. This resulted in several waves of emigration to the US. My grandfather a bricklayer and grandmother were in one of those waves shortly after the turn of the century and came to the US settling in the Chicago area. There they stated a family. The city was growing rapidly then and there was plenty of work especially for a mason so things were apparently going to plan. My father was born in 1913 and spent some of his younger years in Chicago, times of which he never spoke about perhaps because he was too young to remember. Then my grandmother then became ill with some type of respiratory disease and my grandfather was told by the doctor that it would be best if the family was to move into the country. I presume the city air at that time was filled with smoke and soot. So he bought a farm in Wisconsin near a small town called Necedah. There it was that my dad grew up.

Farm life is tough today but even more so then, especially for children. The children were expected to do many chores including milking cows tending to animals and fields there wasn’t much in the way of mechanization. Then occasionally there was time for school. My dad said when they were able to attend school he and his siblings would walk several miles to the school in town. Sometimes they had to endure hot sun, sometime the rain, sometimes cold and snow of the Wisconsin winter. Often times thought the biggest obstacle to getting to school was human; in this case the German boys. Unfortunately the bigotry of Europe had found its way to northern Wisconsin, old hatred is difficult to eradicate even in a new generation on a different continent. Most of the time he was able to get through to school with only a few bumps and bruises. Despite these obstacles he was able to complete through 8^th grade. He was able to read and write but I always felt bad for him because I could see that he didn’t have much confidence in those abilities.

Life wasn’t all work on the farm and when he was free he would do a number of things depending on the season. In the winter they would fashion skis from pieces of wood bending the front tip upward by heating the wood in boiling water over and over again. Then they would fasten them to their boots with leather straps. From what he said they used them more like what we would refer to as cross country skis. They also created their own ice skates which they used on frozen parts of the river.

In the summer he liked to fish and since the farm was situated with the Wisconsin River a short distance to the east and the Yellow River to the west there were many good fishing sites. On occasion he would set his lines in the morning and returned later in the day to retrieve his catch. His favorite fish to catch was the sunfish pictured below. Along the way he would eat berries which grew wildly along the roads and in the woods. It may have been on one of these trips that he was bit in the leg by a poisonous snake and his friend saved his life by removing the venom the old fashion way. He also said he and his father would hunt sometimes along the river or along the edge of the fields to supplement what food they had.

As my father grew older he set his sights on returning to the city, a goal which was going to take some preparation. He never said how but he got his hands on an old Model T Ford which had fallen into disrepair and didn’t run. With a large dose of ingenuity and some old spare parts he was able to collect he was able to get the thing running again. Then one day he decided it was time and he headed off to the big city with a few dollars in his pocket in the hopes of finding a job. Apparently this was in the winter because he said he nearly froze to death on the trip and if he hadn’t installed a gas heater in the car he most likely would have, I guess the model T did not come with a heater as original equipment. At one point he was really snowed in and had to wait for a plow to come along and he then followed that to safety.

He arrived in Chicago when he was about 18 or 19 years which would have been around 1931 or 32 which was not a particularly good time to look for a job as this was in the middle of the Great Depression. I believe he stayed with relatives and in boarding houses when he first arrived. One of the more colorful stories he told was about a guy he met in one of these places who told my dad about a lead on a job. This job was at a gang distillery somewhere in the Chicago area near a river. For this he was paid 5 dollars a week and a gallon of alcohol. He was positioned near the entrance of the road and his job was to watch for any unusual activity from a tree house lavishly appointed with a wired doorbell button and an old chair. Well as the story goes one day a number of large black cars came speeding down the road a couple of them stopped and were guarding the entrance and the rest went speeding down to the distillery. He pressed the doorbell buttin frantically a number of times and then thought he should get out of there. So he climbed down from the tree house and started walking down to the road and toward home. As he walked past the cars left at the entrance one of the armed men there asked him where he was going he replied in Polish hoping to distance himself from the largely Italian operation. He said that he was going home and they just waved him on. His thought was that they let him go because he was just a young kid.

For a number of years he worked odd jobs and did carpentry while trying to get a job at one of the large manufacturing companies in the Chicago area. Finally after about 6 years he was able to secure a job at Western Electric in Cicero where he began work as a truck driver.

It was during this time that he decided to change his last name from Szczudlo to Studlo. Once I asked him and he said he made this change because it was simpler and that there was a lot of discrimination against Poles at the time and he felt it would make it easier to get a job.

He liked to dance and once told me that he on the weekends he would go to dance halls which were around the Chicago area. The most popular of these was the Willowbrook Ballroom which is still in existence today.

He also liked music and played a concertina and the trumpet by ear. He never said how he learned to play. Occasionally when we were young he would take out his concertina and play polkas on it, a great memory!

This brings us up to outbreak of WWII and he never spoke very much about his life during that time, so someone else may be able to fill in the details.

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Dad’s 100th Part 3: The 1930s

1930 U.S. Census Federal for Josef Szczudlo, Necedah Township, Juneau Co., WI

1930 U. S. Census Federal for Josef Szczudlo shows that the family own the farm they live on and Josef is working on his own account (for himself). Were they still living on the original 118 acres in Section 27? By this time Frances and Bernice both no longer live at home. Bernice was married to Louis Havlovic, Jr. on February 8, 1930. 

Name	Age on Apr 8	Attending School	Can Read/Write	Citizenship
Josef	48	No	Yes	Papers Filed
Carolina	38	No	Yes	Papers Filed
Leo	16	No	Yes
Joseph	15	Yes	Yes
Sophia	13	Yes	Yes
Theodore	12	Yes	Yes
Mary	10	Yes	yes

The economic boom-times of the 1920s came to a screeching halt with the stock market crash of 1929, that began what we now call the Great Depression.  At it’s peak in 1933,  almost half of the banks in the U. S. had failed and  it left nearly 15 million Americans without jobs.  It was not until 1939 that the U.S. economy regained it’s momentum, however the stock marked did not reach pre-crash levels until the early 1950s. Add to that the effects of a prolonged drought in the 1930s that devastated the Nation’s Great Plains. However, in 1934, severe drought conditions plagued 80% of the nation.  (Wessels Living History Farm, York, Nebraska, has a very interesting article and interactive map depicting the effects Drought in the 1930s.)*

Difficult times may have driven the children to relocated to Chicago, where prospects for employment were more promising.  Even Theodore (see page 35)  who was the only child to remain at home, sought work in the Civilian Conservation Corps [CCC] which began in 1932. 

“Young men flocked to enroll. Many politicians believed that the CCC was largely responsible for a 55 percent reduction in crimes committed by the young men of that day. Men were paid $30 a month, with mandatory $25 allotment checks sent to families of the men, which made life a little easier for people at home.“ Pasted from <http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1586.html>

Leo did not join the CCC as he had already left home for Chicago. When asked by son, James Studlo, about how old he was and what he did when he came to Chicago, Leo’s response was--He left home as soon as he turned 18.  His first job was as a lookout for bootleggers.  He was paid $5 and a bottle of booze a week to sit in a “tree house” in a wooded area, and lookout for anyone suspicious. The tree house was rigged with a doorbell setup that he was to ring if anyone suspicious showed up.  Apparently that job ended after 6-months, when a suspicious car did show up, and after ringing the doorbell, Leo wisely took off.

We loose track of Leo for about five years.  However, on November 16, 1936, he began his nearly 39 years of employment at Western Electric’s Hawthorn Works in Cicero, Illinois.

*I know I am over simplifying the causes and events leading to the Great Depression.  My intent is to show how the economic climate in the U. S. may have affected the Szczudlo Family.

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Dad’s 100th Part 2

Leo Joseph (Szczudlo) age 16 or 17

Map of area where Dad grew up.  The two yellow highlighted areas indicate land the family owned as of 1940. The original 118.66 acres on 19th Ave. and Hwy G, purchased in 1913 and 40 acres on Hwy G near Hwy 21.

I located these postcards taken during the 1910s and 20s and have included them in this post as I have only three photos of the Szczudlo family

Necedah, WI 1910

Dedication of the Hwy 21 Bridge, Necedah, WI 1919

Memorial Day Parade Necedah, WI 1927

Fish Lake near the original 118 acre farm.

Following the marriage of Leo’s father, Josef came three more siblings—Sophie in 1918, Theodore in 1919 and Mary in 1920. 

Left to Right—Bernice, Theodore, Louis Havlovic, Jr., Mary, Leo*, Sophie and Josef, Jr.*   * Leo and Josef, Jr. look so similar in this photo it’s difficult to tell who is who.

Left to right—Carolina, Theodore (Teddy), Louis Havlovic, Jr., Josef, Sr. Leo , Josef, Jr.

This photo shows Mary on the right and Frances on the left in the garden on the farm.

I have been unable to locate a record of the 1920 census, so the next record I have is children attending Hales Prairie School, Necedah District #3. 

School Year	Student	Grade	Age
1917-18	Frances
1919-20	Frances	1	9
1920-21	Frances		9
1921-22	Bernice	1	9
1922-23	Frances	3	13
	Bernice	2	11
1923-24	Joe		8
1924-25	Bernice		13
	Frances		15
	Joe		8
	Leon		11
	Sophie		6
1925-26	Leon	4
	Bernice	6	11
	Sophie	2	8
	Theodore	1	6
	Joe	1	10

Then beginning in 1926 the children attended Rock View School, Necedah District #4.

School Year	Student	Grade	Age
1926-27	Leon	5	13
	Theodore	2	6
	Mary	1	6
	Sophie	2	8
	Joe	2	11
1927-28	Theodore	2	8
	Joe	3	12
	Leon	6	14
	Mary	2	7
1928-29	Joe	4	13
	Sophie	5	10
	Theodore	3	9
	Mary	2	8
	Leon	7	15
1929-30	Leon	8	16
	Sophie	6	11
	Joe	5	14
	Teddy	4	10
	Mary	3	9
1930-31	Sophie	7	12
	Joe	6	15
	Teddy	5	11
	Mary	4	10
1931-32	Joe	7	16
	Sophie	7	13
	Teddy	6	11
	Mary	5	10
1932-33	Sophie	8	14
	Mary	6	12
	Teddy	6	13
1933-34	Mary	7	13
	Teddy	7	14
1934-35	Teddy	8	15
	Mary	8	14

As these were the transcribed enrolment records, I cannot attest to the accuracy  of the original transcriber or mine as I hurriedly jotted the information down. It might warrant a second look someday. 

The 1930 U. S. Federal Census taken on April 8, 1930, does not list Frances and Bernice living with the family. It shows Leo age 16, no longer attending school  The remaining four children, Joe, Sophie, Teddy and Mary are attending school.

1930 U. S. Federal Census

I remember Dad saying that the county used a half-track in the winter, I believe, for plowing the roads.

Dad told me that he learned Polish because that was all that was spoken at home.

Dad told, my Brother Jim that they would use boards as skis to get around in the snow.

I recall the story of Dad’s crooked arm.  It involved a hornet’s nest, a bull and a veterinarian.  The exact details are fuzzy but but the best I can remember is a bull got into a hornet’s nest and poor Dad was nearby and got his arm broken by the bull. A local veterinarian set it for him.

While I think times were hard on the farm, Dad did enjoy music and knew how to play polkas on the concertina.

Boy could Dad polka.  I remember going to weddings and he would polka, but not with Mom—she wouldn’t or couldn’t polka.

Petenwell Rock/Dam

The Petenwell Dam was built in the 1940s, after Dad left home for the big city so the area would have been very different when he lived there than it is today.

This postcard of Petenwell Rock reflects the way it would have looked when Dad lived in Necedah.

The legend of Petenwell Rock holds that an Indian man and Indian princess named Clinging Vine fell in love. Clinging Vine's father frowned on the match, so the two lovers ran off. Pursued by the Chief and a band of warriors, Clinging Vine and her lover climbed the tall rock on the banks of the Wisconsin river.  Rather than be captured and separated, the lovers leaped from the rock, into the water, never to be seen again.  In fact, the Rock is named after Peter Wells, an early settler who owned it.

The Petenwell Flowage consists of 23,040 acres and is the second largest inland body of water in Wisconsin. It was built in the late 1940s for hydroelectric generation and flood control. The flowage is on Wisconsin's Central plain or Central Sand, the ancient bed of Glacial Lake Wisconsin that was a prehistoric one-million-acre body of water.

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Dad’s 100th Birthday Part 1

 

1910 U. S. Federal Census for Josef Szczudlo (ZZudlo on form) address is 1741 18th Place, Ward 11, Chicago, Illinois Enumerated on 20-26 April 1910

Leo Joseph Szczudlo was born on Tuesday, July 22, 1913 at 1741 18th Place, Chicago, IL, the home of his parents.  Leo was the 4th child of Josef  (29 yrs.) and Mary Stuczka Szczudlo (28 yrs.), joining  sisters Francis (b 1909) and Bernice (b 1911).  Leo’s brother Anton (b 1907) died at age 3yrs 7mos. after a one-week bout of measles that turned into pneumonia. At the time of Leo’s birth, his father, Josef, worked as a bricklayer and mother, Mary, was a stay-at-home mom. Leo was Baptized at St Adalbert’s Church, 1650 W 17th Street in Chicago, on August 3, 1913.

 

 

 

 

 

                                      Anton Szczudlo Death Certificate

 

Mary Stuczka Wedding Photo

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In February of 1913, Josef and Mary had purchased land in Section 27 of Juneau County, Wisconsin for the amount of $1,375. I remember being told that the decision to relocate to Wisconsin was because of Mary’s frail health.

See southwest corner of section 27.  Jozef Szczudlo 118.66 acres.

It is not known when the family made the move to Wisconsin, but by December 30, of 1915, when Leo’s brother Josef was born they were residents of Necedah.  On February 29 1916, Mary died of tuberculosis, leaving Josef with four children under the age of  7, one a two-month old infant. 

 

Birth Certificate of Josef, Jr 30 Dec 1915 and Death Certificate of Mary Szczudlo 29 Feb 1916

How did Josef, Sr. manage with 4 small children?  We will never know.  Did he have the help of neighbors, or the church?  Did he get help from his brother Julian (he lived with them in 1910, per the census)? Was Julian still in the USA? How much help could he have been?  Perhaps the children went to live Franciscous (Frank) and his wife Kasmira, who had five small children of their own.  That does seem a likely option, however, I have no way to prove that scenario.  

The next major event in the life of young Leo was the marriage of his father to Carolina on September 10, 1917. Where did Carolina come from?  I cannot find any immigration for her, but I must say that I don’t know if I have the correct spelling of her name.  I have two spellings for her surname. First was from the marriage certificate—Szynaszik.  Oddly, the surname of the priest that married Josef and Carolina was very similar to hers—Szynerzak.  Was she related to the priest or was this a coincidence?  Second was from Carolina’s death certificate—Szymaczski. 

Josef had three more children with Carolina:  Sophie born 22 Jan 1918, Theodore born 9 Jan 1919 and Mary born in 1920.

More to come in part 2.

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